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American Splendor (2003) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | September 12, 2003
Almost only counts in horseshoes: Paul Giamatti is once again the best thing in a bad movie
American Navel Gazer
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
American Splendor. Starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, Shari Springer Berman, James Urbaniak, Sylvia Kauders, and Harvey Pekar. Based upon original material by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner. Written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. (Fine Line Features, Color, 101 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
Having long admired Paul Giamatti’s acting chops, and having seen Terry Zwigoff’s movie Ghost World—a wonderful and quietly tragic movie also based on an underground comic book series—I was prepared to enjoy a movie that seemed right up my alley.
First off: This movie is well-made and Giamatti gives a great performance, as does Hope Davis (About Schmidt), who plays his wife, Joyce.
However, American Splendor doesn’t put me in the comic book world any more than, say, Remains of the Day, or Spartacus did. Despite the directors using a number of gimmicks, such as inserting comic strip panels and animation and inter-cutting scenes with the real-life Harvey Pekar (the comic book author upon whom the movie is based) and his wife and nerd co-worker Joyce Brabner, this movie still put up a wall between itself and me, whereas in Ghost World, I got totally sucked into the atmosphere, as there was much more graphic unity and cohesion with the plot and characters.
Another reason is that in Ghost World, I found it easier to sympathize and empathize with the characters. Not so with Harvey Pekar. Sure, Giamatti’s fun to watch, but he doesn’t have very good monologue to work with (he’s a bit of a recluse, to say the least) or dialogue. He’s sort of similar to Seymour, Steve Buscemi’s loner from Ghost World (and, I have heard from aficionados, Seymour was based in part on Pekar, a friend of comic illustrator Robert Crumb). Unlike Seymour, however, Pekar has few redeeming qualities.
The harrowing misfortune of living with depression and cancer aside, I’ve never seen such a bitter, negative, and self-indulgent character like Harvey Pekar. He’s billed as a “curmudgeon,” so I was expecting him to be an intelligent cynic with ascerbic wit, sort of a modern-day H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain.
But Pekar never really does more than grunt about not wanting to look on the brighter side of life, because that’s “Hollywood bullshit.” The most intellectual he gets is when he’s a guest on “Late Night with David Letterman” for the fifth time or so, when he accuses Letterman of being a sellout, because his show is on NBC, and NBC is owned by General Electric, a company that makes weapons systems. That’s his great big revelation? Would be perhaps had I not heard it out of the mouths of John Cusack and Tim Robbins so many times before.
Basically, Pekar’s schtick is chronicling his commonplace, everyday—but empty—life. Mind you, not finding something beautiful and unique about it, but just giving his readers (who are these people that waste their time on such mindless drivel?) something that’s “real,” not like the “Hollywood bullshit” he so disdains.
His stories revolve around his job as a file clerk at the Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland, trips to the supermarket, etc. At the hospital, we run into a handful of his oddball co-workers, but not much else. His journey to the express lane while getting trapped behind a kvetching woman with a handful of coupons is cute, but not terribly novel. From Pekar, I get the feeling of a recycled Andy Rooney monologue: “Did you ever notice that I’m really just an moping loser with nothing to say?”
Except even Rooney uses voice inflection to try to actually interest his audience, as does Giamatti. Had the directors left Giamatti alone to perform the role, maybe I wouldn’t be down on Pekar so much. But, by writing the real Pekar into the script, they sabotage anything Giamatti has done to make him marginally sympathetic, interesting or intelligent.
The real Pekar comes off as sort of a non-entity at best, and a grouch complaining about meaningless trivial inconveniences at worst. He’s (dare I say it?) a bore! A navel-gazing, self-pitying bore!
Thus we are left wanting for any inspiration whatsoever, the victims of a false advertising campaign. There’s no “splendor” at all to his self-loathing and negativity. Pekar is basically a man so nihilistic, he’d make Nietzsche blush.
But, unlike Nietzsche, Pekar has negated even the possibility of there being any heroic overmen, not to mention just decent and interesting people.
Want proof of how Harvey Pekar’s life has been mostly wasted (based upon what’s presented in this film, at least)? Here it is: He worked at the V.A. Hospital in Cleveland long enough to earn a retirement party. That’s a pretty huge chunk taken out of his life.
Have you ever been to a V.A. Hospital? It’s a ready-made central casting for a novel (or even comic book) of epic proportions: So many aging soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen, and they’ve all got stories to tell. Tales of daring exploits and understated, modest, disclaimers of any heroism at all. At his fingertips, any time he wanted to lunch with them at the cafteria or share a coffee at the canteen, he could have given the world a treasure trove of stories of our many heroes, a few cowards, some braggarts, a few saints and quite a few sinners.
He could have opened up to the rest of us the world of the forgotten veterans too poor to go anywhere else but the V.A. Hospital, of American Legion members who go there rather than their private docs, just to chew the fat and share old war stories with their fellow comrades,of the ancient guy sitting outside the entrance in his wheelchair, using a few of his last precious breaths to suck in nicotine, smoking a Camel through his tracheostomy tube,the heartbreak of lonely old homeless vets, who’ve no family left in the world, just waiting to die.
Oddly, we meet none of these colorful types. Harvey Pekar is too busy staring at file cabinet drawers, complaining about the length of lines at the store, and gazing at his own navel lint to look beyond to see a grand and glorious world outside of himself.
But, of course, Pekar’s world precludes the very existence of such people as heroes, and the wars they fought and won were nothing more than “Hollywood bullshit.”
American Splendor is the antithesis of It’s A Wonderful Life: It unintentionally answers the question “would the world have been better off without Harvey Pekar?” with “who gives a rat’s ass?”
But, of course, any other answer would have been more of the same, phony “Hollywood bullshit.”
I do recommend “American Splendor,” however, when it comes out as a DVD rental, so that viewers can watch some good performances, as well as competent color timing, sound editing and film splicing.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Comedies, Graphic Novel Adaptations, Independent Films, Movie Reviews | Comments Off on American Splendor (2003) – Movie Review